Hello everyone! I'm realitykid (Devon Day) and I'm here just out of curiosity. I'm a Linux user, SimplyMEPIS 8.5 to be exact, and I have heard a lot about BSD. Now, I'm not itching to make any sort of migration from one system to another. I just did that with Windows. I'm just wondering how much better BSD is compared to Linux. It's just a curiosity, I'm not here to be a know it all (otherwise I wouldn't be asking) or to start a flame war of any kind. I'm one of the "peaceful" Linux users. I'm not an extremist and I do realize that Linux has flaws. Anyway! I'll be waiting for a reply!

Define "better". Until clarity in terminology is acheived, any discussion is simply handwaving.

Better as in what BSD can do better than Linux or what BSD can do that Linux can't. And even opinions might satisfy me. I'm a tech minded guy just looking around for a better understanding of these things. However, I haven't got the resources available to me right now to try BSD for myself. And I'm not about to install BSD in place of my Linux installation. Not now that I'm comfortable.

Let me start of with some questions:

1) How friendly is BSD? I've heard some stories of it actually getting more and more friendly, specifically with the PC-BSD install process.

2) Does BSD interact well with most hardware? As in detecting it, having working drivers for it out of the box (or user installable drivers). I'm talking about stuff like video and audio specifically. But even wireless, which leads me to my next question.

3) Does BSD do well with wireless connections? I'm not talking specifically PCI wireless cards, but also USB adapters (such as mine).

4) Last, but certainly not least, does BSD usually have good community support? Now this is a big one for me. I wouldn't touch Linux with a ten foot pole, let alone use it, if the Linux based operating system that I want to use doesn't have a good community.

Anyway, those are just the basics. Anything else you want to add, go for it. The more information I can get, the better my understanding will become.

Agreed, I resisted the urge to write a long elaborate comparison, just for you.

In the future, while your intentions may have been honest, asking for a generalized and unbiased comparison is just unfair.. you need to do your own research using the information you have available, and make your own conclusions.

Also, I notice you mention "BSD", and while you're posing in the FreeBSD section.. you may or may not realize that each of the BSD's have been developed separately for many years, and have diverged considerably.

Agreed, I resisted the urge to write a long elaborate comparison, just for you.

In the future, while your intentions may have been honest, asking for a generalized and unbiased comparison is just unfair.. you need to do your own research using the information you have available, and make your own conclusions.

Also, I notice you mention "BSD", and while you're posing in the FreeBSD section.. you may or may not realize that each of the BSD's have been developed separately for many years, and have diverged considerably.

Thanks for the help, rather the lack there of. That aside, I consider one BSD to be a branch of another. They are all related in the fact that all of the BSD operating systems are "BSD based". Not a whole lot different from what people call "Linux distributions". And I posted in the FreeBSD section because there wasn't a specific place for BSD in general.

Anyways, obviously community friendliness isn't something that is of value here. Unless that sense of hostility that I'm getting is unfounded.

However, I haven't got the resources available to me right now to try BSD for myself. And I'm not about to install BSD in place of my Linux installation. Not now that I'm comfortable.

If personally uninterested, you might not have an easy time making a comprehensive comparison.. learning enough about a new operating system always requires using it for yourself and gaining a first hand experience about all the ins and outs.. like day-to-day operation.

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Originally Posted by realitykid

1) How friendly is BSD? I've heard some stories of it actually getting more and more friendly, specifically with the PC-BSD install process.

Friendliness is such a hard to define term, people tend to be different in a wide variety of ways.. perhaps some people want a computer to be more like a consumer appliance, others want customization, some operating systems are more suitable for that than others, but in the Unix community a vast amount of environments are possible.

From my understanding, PC-BSD is essentially introducing the "distribution" concept from the Linux community and building a desktop environment suitable for perhaps casual computer user around FreeBSD operating system (..kernel/userland) and offering extensibility using a software distribution system similar to Mac OS X "dmg" files.

The installer for all of the BSD's have typically shared a common attribute, offering a similar experience whether you're on a system with a keyboard/monitor or installing headless over a serial connection, internally there isn't much difference between a local simulated terminal (kbd/monitor) or a real DEC VT220.

Things might be changing, not everyone is familiar with text-based installers, but, done properly they can be quite "friendly" and even offer a level of control not offered by a graphical installer.. a Unix operating system is typically separate from any graphical stack you may or may not run atop of it (X+GTK/Qt).

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Originally Posted by realitykid

2) Does BSD interact well with most hardware? As in detecting it, having working drivers for it out of the box (or user installable drivers). I'm talking about stuff like video and audio specifically. But even wireless, which leads me to my next question.

As said, all of the BSD's have been developed separately.. they have varying levels of hardware support, but surprisingly a lot more than you might expect, in most cases the problem is related to lack of developer time and resources (..chipset documentation).

There is typically no installable drivers, most are already bundled, but in the case of NetBSD and FreeBSD.. some drivers are not part of the default kernel image/binary and need to be selectively loaded (..kernel modules).

With OpenBSD, all supported drivers are part of the default kernel (GENERIC/MP) and hardware is detected at each and every boot.. and new hardware/drivers are written with each new release.

I'll touch on some issues with graphics, proprietary drivers for ATI/AMD do not exist on any of the BSD's, but quite fortunately you do not need them, this vendor has provided documentation to write open source drivers, and 3D acceleration should work, some slack should be given for later cards, as this takes time, nVidia does provide a proprietary driver for FreeBSD only, 2 open source drivers also exist (..one reverse engineered, the other now unmaintained by nVidia, 2D-only, and lacking support for new cards), this new open source driver still hasn't really made it's way into the BSD world.. not yet.

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Originally Posted by realitykid

3) Does BSD do well with wireless connections? I'm not talking specifically PCI wireless cards, but also USB adapters (such as mine).

There is no defined standard for such cards, individual drivers must be written for each new chipset and card family released by a vendor.. this takes time, vendors do not typically release drivers for BSD, so work is typically done by developers based on previous effort (..perhaps reverse engineering Linux drivers) or by obtaining documentation.

You'll have to approach this on a card by card basis, you can find a vendor/product number for your specific device and then determine if support exists in the specific *BSD flavour you're using.

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Originally Posted by realitykid

4) Last, but certainly not least, does BSD usually have good community support? Now this is a big one for me. I wouldn't touch Linux with a ten foot pole, let alone use it, if the Linux based operating system that I want to use doesn't have a good community.

There are always levels of reduced activity, but, you may be glad to know that each BSD has been around for a long time.. and it's modern-day derivatives still maintain vibrant and close-nit communities, user forums, and official mailing lists.

I recommend reading more at the official websites, you can find more information, for at least NetBSD and OpenBSD, a large portion of development and user-related activity is on mailing lists.. but forums like daemonforums exist, there are even Usenet lists still active after several decades of operation.

Thanks for the help, rather the lack there of. That aside, I consider one BSD to be a branch of another. They are all related in the fact that all of the BSD operating systems are "BSD based". Not a whole lot different from what people call "Linux distributions". And I posted in the FreeBSD section because there wasn't a specific place for BSD in general.

Anyways, obviously community friendliness isn't something that is of value here. Unless that sense of hostility that I'm getting is unfounded.

This isn't really true, BSD's are unlike Linux distributions, the kernels and userlands are developed separately.. they may have originated from a shared ancestor, but each has their own methodologies and ideals now that have influenced the development in several different ways.

They are not distributions of something only lightly modified, and they are not amalgamations of 3rd party software.. they have a life of their own.

As for friendliness, you approached this wrong, I did end up posting responses to your questions.. but doing some initial research would have avoided ruffling feathers here, most undoubtedly garnering you some more friendlier responses.

Again, hope some of your answers were answered.. feel free to ask further questions, so long as you're willing to go that extra step.

If you want my personal opinion then I would say that DragonFlyBSD is my favorite "BSD" for a desktop.

It has HAMMER file system, with instant recovery (so does FBSD with ZFS some say, but I have never tried FBSD with ZFS), so you don't need to worry about fsck after OS crash. This is (for me) a top feature. Also adding extra disk volumes is very easy (one command and your fs has extra GB - no need to adding stuff to fstab).

It has a snapshots system, so you can "go back in time" and reverse some stupid mistake in config files or undo some changes in your home documents (even after trashing it!).

DFBSD was not designed for desktops but runs pretty well even on a netbook with small internal disk (20 GB ssd with HAMMER).

What I have to like in DFBSD is pkgsrc, which isn't so up-to-date as ports in FreeBSD, but in the end you can make with it your favorite WM/DE with most needed apps (WINE isn't working under DFBSD).

The issue I had with most BSDs I have tried on my netbook was suspend. It seems that I just have to live with out that option with is fine with me.

For a new comer - I would recommend PC-BSD or DesktopBSD (a better but out-of-date option) or installing FBSD with PC-BSD installer (sysinstall is a mess when you use it first time - good thing is another computer with google or youtube around). FBSD based OSs (as all above) are very close to linux when you compare available apps (i know this is not an OS issue but still counts specially for new comers) and hardware support.

Because of pkgsrc and a smaller number of binary packages DragonFlyBSD (NetBSD I suppose also) and other that do not use FBSD ports need more flexibility and adjustment, therefore shouldn't be used as a first BSD "distro"

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Now, I'm not itching to make any sort of migration from one system to another. I just did that with Windows.

When you write some thing like that, for me it sounds like

"I don't want to spend an hour or two with google and a trylion of web pages, let then do the job"

Why don't you install virtualbox or use a 4-8GB usb-stick SD and install one of BSDs and see for your self. After a while linux will be a history for you&your computer

I apologize for my previous statements on "lack of community friendliness". I also apologize for not looking this up for myself. I guess that, from now on, I'll at least make an honest attempt at researching some stuff for myself.

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Originally Posted by klanger

Why don't you install virtualbox or use a 4-8GB usb-stick SD and install one of BSDs and see for your self. After a while linux will be a history for you&your computer

I would, however I have very limited amount of HDD space (I have a single 40GB IDE) and only two 2gb Flash drives. So space is kind of limited right now. However, I am planning on getting an extra 40gb drive installed into my computer to make more room on my main partition.

IMO RealityKid, another big question is which desktop environment you want to use. I prefer BSD over Linux for that reason. With Linux, you only get what they give you. There's an occasional case like with KUbuntu that uses KDE instead of GNOME, but for the most part what you get is what you get. With BSD, you can use packages/ports to get whatever you want: KDE, GNOME, Xfce, or one of the lighter-weight window managers like Fluxbox. Personally, I have been using OpenBSD with GNOME but will likely try Xfce very soon since it is a lot lighter weight. I have heard that KDE is 210 MB, GNOME is 180, and Xfce is only 15, so there is a good speed (and probably security) advantage from using Xfce.

Earlier you asked "...what BSD can do better than Linux or what BSD can do that Linux can't. " The latter half of that statement is an oft-asked but poor question. A better way of asking would be "What does BSD have (as opposed to 'can do') that Linux doesn't?" That answer is, in one word: quality. I remember first getting into Linux when a friend recommended Linux Mint. It was a pretty good distro but when new releases came out it was hindered by innumerable bugs inherited from Ubuntu. That friend that had recommended it to me spent an entire day trying to go back from Mint 8 to 7 because of that instability. There is a lot better quality control on BSD, particularly OpenBSD, since it is constantly audited for bugs and security issues. Also, when there are less bugs, there is usually a higher level of security since bugs can often be exploited.

To answer some of your other questions, PC-BSD has a good installer but only comes with KDE. Personally, I can't stand KDE, but I recommend trying at least the big three (KDE, GNOME, Xfce) to see what you like best. OpenBSD's installer is command line but is very quick and straightforward. Depending on your wireless configuration, there are good man pages for OpenBSD that give you commands to get it up and running. If you're stumped, ask in the OpenBSD section and the folks here can ask (most likely) for the output of some commands and will give you some man pages that will point you in the right direction. I and other forum members can also help you get a GUI running if you need. I prefer using packages to install them. There are a few commands that will download everything you need and install it. Just let us know what you think.

Lok Technologies, a San Jose, Calif.-based maker of networking gear, started out using Linux in its equipment but switched to OpenBSD four years ago after company founder Simon Lok, who holds a doctorate in computer science, took a close look at the Linux source code.

"You know what I found? Right in the kernel, in the heart of the operating system, I found a developer's comment that said, 'Does this belong here?' "Lok says. "What kind of confidence does that inspire? Right then I knew it was time to switch."

1) Friendly enough. Be warned I call ed friendly.
2) Not as well as Linux, although FreeBSD likes my hardware better than most Linux distro :-).
3.) The wireless support in Free/Open has been the best of any OS I've used. I assume Net' is also. Using supported hardware helps!
4.) Even more scientifically irrelevant than the first :-o.

Usually, the Linux community associates "friendliness" with the ability to install by blindly accepting default choices. If this is your measure of friendliness, then the *BSD family may fall short.

Installing any of the *BSD's is not complicated, but it does require the user to familiarize themselves with the documentation provided by each project. Each of the *BSD's Websites have significant sections dedicated to installation, & studying this carefully should resolve most questions. The problems we typically deal with is users who have not taken the time to read the documentation.

Case in point, the OpenBSD install script is simply a shell script. Some may find this as barbaric, but experienced users prefer this for its simplicity & ability to get the job done efficiently. Installation has been clocked on YouTube at ~four minutes, not that this is recommended, but it points out that installation doesn't need to include the graphics of World of Warcraft nor soundtracks akin to the Hamster dance. Installation should not involve heavyweight applications which may alter, or introduce its own set of issues to the hardware environment. If problems occur during installation, it is simpler to ferret out problems if the installation process is lightweight and minimally obstrusive.

A better measure of "friendliness" is the documentation available. Each of the major projects in the *BSD family takes documentation very seriously, & the resulting clarity shows in the manpages. Here, the Linux community tends to fall short given that the common question coming from Linux users when first approaching the *BSD's is "Where are the howto's?". The various *BSD communities find this redundant given the time spent on cleaning up manpages. The information found in the manpages as well as on the project Websites should be sufficient for most questions -- both for the newbie & experienced user alike.

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Does BSD interact well with most hardware?

Yes. Is there hardware that Linux supports that the *BSD's don't? Yes.

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As in detecting it, having working drivers for it out of the box (or user installable drivers). I'm talking about stuff like video and audio specifically.

For common, easily accessible hardware, yes.

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Does BSD do well with wireless connections?

When it comes to wireless, the *BSD family does about as well as Linux.

Without more information about what you specifically have, most common cards work on most platforms as they do on Linux.

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Last, but certainly not least, does BSD usually have good community support?

It depends upon what are your expectations. The projects are smaller than Linux, & the communities are smaller as well. Researched questions are heartily greeted, as are informed questions requesting clarification. jggimi's earlier link to a thread discussing how to ask questions is very much worth your time to read.

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Better as in what BSD can do better than Linux or what BSD can do that Linux can't.

The biggest thing Linux cannot duplicate is the BSD heritage. The *BSD family all have one to two different common sources. Each member of the family has diverged from the other, but all are built on a core source base which is over thirty years old. Linux is based on code which is only ~fifteen years old. Irregardless of how many smart people are working on it, there is just some stability issues that the *BSD's have worked out that Linux has yet to match.

Better as in what BSD can do better than Linux or what BSD can do that Linux can't.

Linux can do everything any operating system in existence can do, not just BSDs. That is the major problem with the Linux. Usually if you think you are good for everything you are good for nothing. On the more serious note I would not try to waist my time using BSDs for instance for things like high performance computer clusters. At the same time OpenBSD is by all measure the best network appliance OS you can get. NetBSD niche is probably embedded systems even though OpenBSD is equal good. When it comes to file-system performance NetBSD rules. DragonFly is not mature project yet but one day hopefully will be the OS for clusters. FreeBSD looks a bit to me as a Linux of FreeBSD world. It is the most popular and the one I personally like the least.

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Originally Posted by realitykid

1) How friendly is BSD? I've heard some stories of it actually getting more and more friendly, specifically with the PC-BSD install process.

It looks to me that your notion of friendliness is diametrically opposite of what most BSD people consider friendly. Based on that BSD is not for you.

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Originally Posted by realitykid

2) Does BSD interact well with most hardware? As in detecting it, having working drivers for it out of the box (or user installable drivers). I'm talking about stuff like video and audio specifically. But even wireless, which leads me to my next question.

Linux driver layer SUCKS big time. That is why you have Ubuntu supporting a peace of hardware in one release just to have problems with another release. Solaris common driver API is an example of how drivers should interact with the kernel. BSDs do support most open hardware. I dare to claim that in terms of Network OpenBSD supports far more hardware than Linux. On another hand if you are looking for proprietary binary blob drivers for BSDs you will not find any for most part (with some exception of FreeBSD).

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Originally Posted by realitykid

3) Does BSD do well with wireless connections? I'm not talking specifically PCI wireless cards, but also USB adapters (such as mine).

Yes!!! At least OpenBSD which is my OS of choice.

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Originally Posted by realitykid

4) Last, but certainly not least, does BSD usually have good community support? Now this is a big one for me. I wouldn't touch Linux with a ten foot pole, let alone use it, if the Linux based operating system that I want to use doesn't have a good community.

I think again that yours and mine perception of good community are diametrically opposite. BSD has fantastic community consisting of very competent people with many years of professional experience. Many of this people haven't known anything else except Unix whole their lives. On another hand the life is too short to help every idiot who doesn't want to read the documentation. I have seen a "good Ubuntu community". A trivial poorly researched question is immediately answered by two dozen of completely incompetent users who have no clue what they are talking about. No, we do not have nor we need such communities.